This is Falcons’ debut with m0NESY, but if you didn’t know any better, you wouldn’t think it.
Falcons have stunned supposed challengers to Vitality's streak in MOUZ at the IEM Melbourne semi-finals, claiming a swift 2-0 (13-3, 13-6) win and booking a ticket to Sunday's grand final.
All eyes are now fixed to the Saudi-backed Falcons who have been awoken; the "sleeping giants," as coined by commentator Harry Russell, are now charging for the final and may yet prove enough to end juggernauts Vitality and put a stop to their record streak.
Vitality are yet to confirm their spot on championship Sunday as they take on The MongolZ this evening, but to Ilya "m0NESY" Osipov, the "who" doesn't matter — he just wants to get his stage reps with Falcons.
He spoke with esports.gg following the big win to talk the approach to playoffs in Melbourne and his limited time with the roster — including becoming accustomed to coach Danny "zonic" Sørensen.
m0NESY: "You just talk to [zonic], he has full aura"
First GamerLegion and now MOUZ — that’s one of the cleanest playoff stages we’ve seen down here. The veto looked comfortable for you guys as well, talk me through the pre-game and the series against MOUZ.
"We just expected all these maps, but honestly I don’t care about the maps, I like every map in CS. The main focus I guess is we should play the maps that are comfortable for the team. I’d be happy even if it was Train, I’d definitely want some experience on the stage with Train."
Before you joined the team Falcons did play a heap of Dust 2, but lately success had been hard to come by; they’ve gone 1-5 over the past six matches and a lot of those losses weren’t pretty. Has this been something the team had planned for Melbourne?
"Yeah, I mean, I would say that we're not bad on Dust 2 and Nuke in particular. On T side, it’s important, but we’re especially good when we play CT. I just feel like we [are] all kind of connected to each other, we know what to expect with each other.
"I know what to expect from NiKo because we’ve played together as a pair for a long time at G2 and we had great success on Dust 2 back in the days. Nuke as well, Inferno, Mirage… every map! I’m joking, I’m joking!
"I do feel like we sometimes can lose a lot of situations in advantage because we’re maybe sometimes a little bit in a hurry to finish the round or finish a round, or we're crushing things and are confident and we get ahead of ourselves. This is the first thing that we should work on."
Everyone looked to MOUZ as the challenges to Vitality, they’ve been building for this meeting but you’ve ended their hopes here in a big way. Had you guys considered that Vitality would be a hurdle you’d have to leap over at some point in the playoffs? You did meet in the group stage…
"I honestly never really cared too much about Vitality. I mean, when we came to the tournament… We know Vitality is the best team in the world, but I want to play against other teams also.
"I just want to play tournaments. If we're going to meet [Vitality], we meet them. When we played against them for the first time and we lost, obviously you just want to meet them again and win, it’s kind of like revenge. We were not satisfied with that loss because I felt like we just gave them a lot of chances to come back on the first map."
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A lot of people have spoken about you linking back up with NiKo and how great it's been both in and out of the server. But I know, going back years, you've always said you were really looking forward to playing with zonic as coach. What makes him the be-all, end-all coach?
"First of all, when you just talk to him about the game, you just see that he understands a lot of things from the game. He immediately has an answer to your question.
"But I also noticed that whenever we play on the stage or when we played in the group stage booth he was always calm. Whenever he was taking tactical timeouts he always had calmness in his voice. He’s not very stressful to either make a call or to calm us down, to tell us everything is under control.
"I just think that he is just a coach that knows when to do things in the game. Like, if we need to play like this right now, he would take a tactical timeout and we would do it. I don't know how to explain it in English, but he knows where to find fish. I'm enjoying playing with him and working with him and just speaking with him day by day.
"I have a lot of things to improve and obviously we will work together and share experience. He will share his full experience; you just talk to him, he has full aura."
I spoke to Damjan (kyxsan) earlier this week about you joining the team and how in the limited practice time you’ve been just working on the basics like callouts. What’s been the biggest challenge of fitting into this Falcons system?
"Honestly, I feel like I fit in pretty smoothly, like pretty good. I haven’t had any issues with anyone. I would say from the first practice we were kind of all connected.
"I just didn't know any strats they have, any setups and any call-outs on the maps, you know, the keywords. Everything comes from practice, but because we didn't have too much practice, that’s always the hardest this early."
"So I still don't know half of the things they have, we play only with half of the things they told me. But the most important thing is we just prepare for each game with the tactics that we need.
"There is a lot of the strategy that is similar to what I remember from G2, or even just general defaults that you see at tier one, it’s just the words around it.
"A lot of the basics I know and they don’t even have to explain to me — I was already doing it."
Falcons take on the winner of The MongolZ and Vitality in tomorrow's IEM Melbourne grand final. For more CS2 news stay tuned to esports.gg.
